Bribe bid buys cartel operative 11 extra years

Updated 11:06 pm, Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Photo: Anonymous, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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In this picture provided by the Mexican Attorney General's Office in Mexico City, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2007, Juan Carlos de La Cruz Reyna is seen in an undated photo. The alleged high-ranking Gulf drug cartel member wanted in Texas for threatening to kill U.S. federal agents was seized along with six others in a raid on a steak house in Mexico City, federal prosecutors confirmed Wednesday. (AP Photo/Mexico Attorney General's Office) ** NO SALES **

BROWNSVILLE — A Gulf Cartel operative who served prison time for the 1999 assault of two U.S. officers has been sentenced to an additional 11 years for trying to bribe his way to a chartered deportation to Matamoros, Mexico, his home turf.

Juan Carlos De La Cruz Reyna, 37, apologized at his sentencing in a Brownsville federal court Wednesday, saying: “I committed the crime so I could save my life.”

His federal prison sentence was one of six handed down in what U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen termed a “giant bribery scheme.”

Defense lawyers suggested an undercover government agent upped the negotiated bribe to nearly $800,000 to steepen the sentencing range upon conviction. They also questioned the status level of the official the defendants thought they were bribing.

“You don't pay $797,000 to a dog catcher,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jody Young countered. “You don't pay $797,000 to a person who writes out traffic tickets. ... This is the first bribery of this nature I've ever had. I don't know what the going rate is.”

He was charged in 2002 with two counts of threatening to assault and murder federal agents. The Justice Department listed him as one of 10 “major drug defendants” to be extradited from Mexico to the United States in December of 2008.

De La Cruz Reyna was ending a 30-month prison sentence in Atlanta when he began negotiations for a special plane trip to the immigration detention center in Bayview and a release at an international bridge linking Brownsville to Matamoros. There, he would be released to elements of the Gulf Cartel.

Co-defendant Julio Torres, 40, who was sentenced to 120 months, and Adalberto Nuñez-Venegas, 40, who is scheduled for sentencing in January, made payments of cash and real estate that totaled $797,000 between May 2011 and March 2012

On March 14, after De La Cruz Reyna was transferred to Texas, the co-defendants met with the agent to discuss each person's role in the handover to Mexico. All were arrested at the meeting, as was De La Cruz Reyna, that same day.

Reynaldo Garza, De La Cruz's defense attorney, said his client faced either further prosecution in Mexico or death by cartel rivals.

“He didn't know where Atlanta would deposit him, and that was the danger,” Garza said. “His motivation for paying such a high price was self-preservation. He would have been strung up to a lamppost.”